How to run an Agile software process without using any Agile

My agile is better than your Agile, because my agile uses lower case

Nobody knows what Agile means.

Every single software company says that they do agile, but not Agile. Agile is turkey, taking over everything from meatloaf to bacon such that nobody even knows where it used to come from.

Although there is a set of agile guidelines to follow, at your company, you can claim you do agile by doing these three things and occasionally replacing the term recurring meeting with the word ceremony:

1 — Work in iterations

Don’t ship anything at the end of the sprint; just yell “end of sprint” really loud at the right time and drag all in-progress cards to the next sprint.

2 — Run retrospectives

If you call a witch hunt a retrospective, you can say you performing an agile ceremony.

3 — Point cards

Instead of hour estimates, have developers use a point system to provide estimates. Below the VP level, points should map to a card’s complexity and are not compared across teams. Above the VP level, 1 point = 4 hours of work when determining layoffs, and burndown charts are nice visual reminders of which teams are failures.

What to do with Agile zealots

There might be a member of your team that pushes back on this and complains. They will say things like:

• It isn’t really a pointing system unless you use t-shirt sizes and planning-poker.

• We aren’t truly doing Agile here because we aren’t doing Agile Trust Falls (ATFs), and nobody wears the Carry-Over-Dunce-Cap.

• Please join me in the Agile prayer… ‘We believe in people over process….’

• Why did you mute me - we didn’t agree as a team that you have that power

Listen to them in retro until they finally just come out and say exactly how they did things at their last job. Then ask them if their last job was doing Agile (or “Real Agile”) and listen as they admit that they weren’t. Then move on; you have a bunch of requirements acceptance criteria to write.